Crowdsourcing an Earthquake early warning system for the Indian Subcontinent

Abstract

Earthquakes are potentially very destructive natural events. The risk from earthquakes is aggravated because they are unpredictable and can cause tremendous loss of life and property within seconds, particularly in dense urban settings. We present our ongoing work to develop a comprehensive earthquake early warning system (EEWS) for the Indian subcontinent. The impetus for this work comes from the fact that India has just 82 seismic stations for a land area of about 3.2 million sq. km, with no dedicated EEWS, plus low-cost accelerometers are now easily available, and smartphones have deep penetration. The planned system will use a network of mobile smartphones and stationary low-cost MEMS-based strong motion sensors. The main components of this project are: creating a high-density network of low-cost sensors, real-time transmission of data, algorithms to analyze ground shaking data, compute ground motion characteristics, and determine if the source of shaking is an earthquake.